I was always termed as the quiet kid, the weirdo, the girl who is most lost. To be honest, I did get lost, but inside my own head, because mostly the conversations ran in circles and I got tired quickly ( neurotypical lingo for this is: she gets bored very quickly).
So, it won’t be a stretch to say that I felt out of place as a norm. I actively sought solitude and made some really creative excuses to stay hidden from people ( one time I hid myself in a relative’s washroom for the entire time we were visiting them because I was being force fed sweets).
But the tragedy was that I enjoyed cool things a lot, but cool things came with more people. Since, Neurodivergent representation was a fantasy growing up( talking about being a 90’s kid in a small town in India), my problem was a rarity and therefore, quickly glossed over as a childhood quirk.
My heart was always equal parts excited and anxious whenever discovering a new place was involved. I wanted to wander away on my own but was also incredibly scared about having to navigate the social interactions by myself. I remember being so uncomfortable that I had trained myself to stay frozen at one place for hours.
As a grown up , I did learn to camouflage this terror reasonably well as I chose to live away from home ( owing to academic and professional choices) through exposure therapy and also through natural progression as I took up people facing roles.
But the nagging feeling of not belonging anywhere still occasionally creeps up whenever I am at a cool place among cool people.
Fingers in symphony 